Cutter wrote on Nov 21, 2014, 11:26:Indeed. Just donate a few bucks to the guys at Adblock instead. I think Google has more than enough money.

It's not about donating money to the Adblock guys or Google, it's about donating money to Blue's News.

I run Adblock here because the page loads much quicker without ads, and I like the cleaner look of the ad-free page. $1/month is worth it, to me, for a clear conscience and to support the sites I enjoy.

garrywong wrote on Nov 21, 2014, 09:52:HA! HAHAHAHAH! They want me to pay THEM to not see their ads?! What kind of nonsense is this? They have to pay ME a LOT of money to view any stupid ads!

See today's Out of the Blue. I would gladly pay $1/month to support Blue's News and not see any ads. It appears at least part of that money goes to content creators, not Google (it's not clear what Google's take is, if any).

Frijoles wrote on Nov 12, 2014, 11:05:Why would an early purchaser need to pre-order? What did I purchase if not the game?

A person who pre-orders is an early purchaser. They're offering a fairly normal pre-order discount. This is not the same as a backer (which is what I think you're referring to when you said "What did I purchase if not the game"). Backers, with a sufficient pledge, get the game.

Beamer wrote on Sep 12, 2014, 14:25:Wait. So what were they building with a million.And what would you do with weapons and not battles.Did they mean like, PvP but the game would have PvE?

I know you probably can't answer this because I get it. They didn't answer this. It's so weird. It's like someone building a space sim that was just a hanger to walk around in and put towels in your cockpit, without there being an actual game around it unless people donated more.

For the 2,000,000 goal, Combat: "Let the battle begin! Backers will now be able to fight each other online in local space instances." So they make it sound like if they don't hit 2,000,000 you can only battle NPCs in the MMORPG.

The better question is what would the game be like if they fund over 500,000 but less than a million? You don't get your money back (that's what they just announced, if the game funds for less than 500,000 everyone gets their money back), and you have a space-sim with no space flight.

It sounds like they didn't fulfill their promises for MWO. I don't know about that, I didn't play it... but I think anyone would be a fool for backing this project based on these stretch goals.

KS wrote on Jan 27, 2014, 13:25:That's fascinating. I know there was a failed cloud-based gaming service that rendered your 3D and piped video to you. This seems like a local version where you run the video card server.

I can see consumer-level configurations of a tower with multiple 3D cards in it serving a whole family, even if one card could handle more than one game at once.

I've also used OnLive in the past, briefly. In-home streaming is no comparison. Even with a 15mbps connection (5mbps was required, if I remember correctly), it was noticeably laggy. I remember trying to play UT3 on it, and it was terrible.

1gps in-home streaming is like playing on the host rig itself... and Valve still has a ways to go yet (ie currently there is only software encoding).

As it stands now, a tower of 3D cards couldn't serve the whole family, just 1 person.

jdreyer wrote on Jan 27, 2014, 12:45:Right, this is the weak link in the chain. This makes the most sense for laptops, yet most laptops run low bandwidth wireless connectivity. So people would have to run an ethernet cable, and that kind of ruins the point of it. If you're streaming to your TV, you'll have to run ethernet to it, so you may as well run an HDMI cable.

I get where you're going with the HDMI cable, but that doesn't make sense. My main switch is in the office/dungeon and I ran Cat5 upstairs, to another switch/hotspot. Definitely longer than 50', and I wouldn't want to run HDMI that far. But even if I did, that's just the display/audio... what about input?

If I wanted to game outside the dungeon, it would make the most sense for me to use Valve's streaming. If it works well on more intense games, it might even make sense for a dedicated steam box for TV gaming.

I'm in the streaming beta. My gaming rig is in the basement (or the dungeon as my wife likes to call it). She doesn't like the dungeon, but she recently played Broken Age on her laptop, streaming from my gaming rig (I realize that Broken Age isn't the most demanding game ever made).

Connected 1gps wired, it was flawless, as if running locally. Connected wireless it was a bit laggy.

Shataan wrote on Dec 13, 2013, 10:45:what they should do, is deliver it with a decent high rez display.... and take a bit of a loss much like Sony did with the PS 3. Better this, than shipping a less than decent display. Sony took the loss, but not they are everywhere.

Are you kidding? Oculus can't sell this for a loss, it's their only way to make money. Sony could sell consoles for a loss because they take a cut of every game sold. Oculus will not get a cut of every game sold that is Rift enabled.

If you want expensive high resolution displays, Oculus will have to charge for it.

From the video: "But providing vaccines throughout the developing world is no simple task, so Gates has set up his foundation to run like Microsoft. He insists on strict accounting, and, when a problem arises, he pulls in the best people to find solutions."

That doesn't sound naive. Yes, there is waste, but it's worthwhile when trying to eradicate 3 deadly diseases from the world.

InBlack wrote on May 14, 2013, 10:18:Invest in technology that will have a huge long term beneficial effect for humanity, renewable energy for one or something or other that is not really that profitable or is pushed under the rug by the oil/gas lobby.

Also from the video "And Gates showed us one of his boldest and, he says, most important ventures, a new kind of nuclear reactor. It would burn depleted uranium, making it cleaner, safer, and cheaper than today's reactors. Your fuel will last for 60 years. So, during that entire time, you don't need to open it up, refuel it. You don't need to buy more fuel. So there's a certain simplicity that comes with this design."

InBlack wrote on May 14, 2013, 10:18:Or if he wants to give to charity, he should concentrate on the charities that help people in the US (and I say this as a non US citizen). The US has a shitload of poverty related social problems, and the biggest of them has to be education.

From Bill Gates 2009 TED Talk: "Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested in this. There's many people working on it. We've worked on small schools, we've funded scholarships, we've done things in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile -- the very best -- and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class -- based on test scores -- by over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the world away."

Maybe before complaining about how Bill Gates is spending his money you should at least listen to the video. Or better yet, you should try spending some of your pittance (and I have no idea how much you make, but it's a pittance compared to him) and try to solve these problems.

These figures point to the layoffs not being that substantial (of course that assumes that the employee directory is accurate, which it probably isn't). If anyone is interested, I have a list of the 143 people that have been in the employee directory at some point and their hire/fire dates (Way Back Machine started crawling the site 4/14/2010, when the page had 102 people on it).

Dev wrote on Oct 30, 2012, 13:43:BTW, looks like front page is down except for the 1 entry...

There is actually more to the front page than just today's Out of the Blue, you just need to scroll down to see it. This happens because the left navigation bar and "today's" news are within the same table. "Yesterday's" news is in another table below the left nav... so if "today's" news is shorter than the left nav, the page requires some extra scrolling.

At some point Bluenews should get a redesign... at least drop all the nested tables :).

There definitely is a steam code, which gets you Blocks that Matter and The Binding of Isaac. I'm not surprised Voxatron has no Steam code yet since it's in alpha. Go to your redeem page and click the "Get your Steam key" link at the top of the page.

I would disagree... losing with a good hand is a "tough beat," or some such. A bad beat is losing to someone with no business in the pot due to a bad or misplayed hand... Like having a big pocket pair and raising the blinds and someone calls you with 6-2 and wins.

I agree with blue, this wasn't a bad beat. Phillips had an outside straight draw after the flop to Mabuchi's 3 of a kind Aces. The turn put Phillips in the lead with a 9-K edit: A-T straight, a flush draw, and a royal flush draw. The A on the turn completed both hands, but Phillips retained the top hand.

It seemed like a bad beat at first glance because it looked like Phillips needed runner-runner to win the hand; but that just wasn't the case. It looks like there was limited (if any) betting during the hand. Both players had a legitimate stake in the pot, so this was unlucky, not a bad beat.

A bad beat would have looked like this, with the same cards in a different order (and different betting):AA vs KdJdFlop: AdA9A raise of any kind by Mabuchi and a call by Phillips (let's just assume all-in to make it a real bad beat, because Phillips would have had .1% chance of winning.Turn: Jd - (2/45) edit: Qd (2/45)River: Kd - (1/44) edit: Td (1/44)

Another example... I was playing a $30 SNG, I lost an all-in preflop KK vs KK [there is only one way to lose this hand]. We both had a legitimate claim to the pot (the same hand, in fact), but I was just unlucky with a (12/48) * (11/47) * (10/46) * (9/45) * 1 = .2% chance of losing the hand.